Mrs Morgan maths

Why do we put up displays? What makes a good display? What do you want your classroom to say about you as a teacher?

Every teacher is different with different views. These are some of mine and maybe some questions to think about. Here are some ideas for displays in maths, and some of the resources to help you in your classroom.

I put up displays to make my classroom a more interesting place to be. I don't like looking at blank walls, so I like to put up displays that make my classroom aesthetically pleasing. However, I don't like displays that are too mass produced, and printed from the internet - i much prefer student work. When I started teaching, I was in a difficult school, so the displays at the back of my room were always from lessons that I thought went well and displays that would offer me encouragement during year 10 last thing on Friday.

I want my displays to show what my best lessons are like. I want displays that are interactive, use technology, are fun, inspirational, lead by students and informative. In our maths corridor we have an Aurasma wall, where anyone can use an iPad to scan over a poster and see a video or presentation made by the pupils. This is a great way to engage them and to impress prospective parents! If you haven't heard of Aurasma, check out this blog post.

This year, I have become more interested in mathematical history and trying to encourage my students to think about how incredible these ideas were at the time. My husband has been studying this year and through discussing with him how he learns, I realised this is a vital part of fact retention. As someone who is less mathematically minded, he said that having an interesting piece of historical or contextual knowledge with the maths helped him to remember it. So, I created a maths timeline across my classroom. It's great to be able to reference a time when things happened and use QR codes to allow students to research further if they want to.

I like displays that are interactive. I teach some bright students, so having a display that they could think about when other work is complete was vital this year. I found the 2015 year game challenge online, where students need to make the numbers from 1 to 100 using the digits of the year (2, 0 , 1, 5).

We made a display which is a work in progress and has entries from year 7s up to other teachers who couldn't resist!